In 1975, during the Church Committee hearings, the existence of a secret assassination weapon came to light. The CIA had developed a poison that caused the victim to have an immediate heart attack. This poison could be frozen into the shape of a dart and then fired at high speed from a pistol. The gun was capable of shooting the icy projectile with enough speed that the dart would go right through the clothes of the target and leave just a tiny red mark. Once in the body the poison would melt and be absorbed into the blood and cause a heart attack! The poison was developed to be undetectable by modern autopsy procedures.

Can you give a person cancer? If cancer in animals can be caused by injecting them with cancer viruses and bacteria, it would certainly be possible to do the same with human beings! In 1931, Cornelius Rhoads, a pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, purposely infects human test subjects in Puerto Rico with cancer cells; 13 of them died. Though a Puerto Rican doctor later discovers that Rhoads purposely covered up some of the details of his experiment and Rhoads himself gives a written testimony stating he believes that all Puerto Ricans should be killed, he later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Fort Detrick Maryland (origin of the HIV/AIDS virus, the Avian Flu virus and the Swine Flu / A-H1N1 virus), Utah and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.

The answer to the question – Can you give a person cancer – is yes. After nearly 80 years of research and development there is now a way to simulate a real heart attack and to give a healthy person cancer. Both have been used as a means of assassination. Only a very skilled pathologist, who knew exactly what to look for at an autopsy, could distinguish an assassination induced heart attack or cancer from the real thing.

Is death by heart attack, burst aneurysm, of cerebral hemorrhage a “natural cause”? Not if government agencies have found a way to influence your heart rate, blood pressure, or vascular dilatation. Neurological research has found that the brain has specific frequencies for each voluntary movement called preparatory sets. By firing at your chest with a microwave beam containing the ELF signals given off by the heart, this organ can be put into a chaotic state, the so-called heart attack. In this way, high profile leaders of political parties who are prone to heart attacks can be killed off before they cause any trouble. Jack Ruby died of cancer a few weeks after his conviction for murder had been overruled in appeals court and he was ordered to stand trial outside of Dallas — thus allowing him to speak freely if he so desired. There was little hesitancy in Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald in order to prevent him from talking, so there is no reason to suspect that any more consideration would have been shown Jack Ruby if he had posed a threat to people in the US government who had conspired to murder the president of the United States – John F Kennedy.

Matt Simmons, an oil industry expert, was assassinated for turning whistleblower over the Obama administration coverup of the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Investment banker Matt Simmons, who died suddenly, was an energy industry insider and presidential adviser whose profile soared when he wrote that Saudi Arabia is running out of oil and world production is peaking. Simmons, 67, died at his vacation home in Maine. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning “with heart disease as a contributing factor.”

His 2005 best-selling book, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, brought him a wider audience. The book argued that Saudi Arabia vastly overstated the size of its oil reserves and that the world was on the verge of a severe oil shortage as the largest oil fields become depleted. This revelation is backed up by Iran. Iran knows the Middle East oil supply is quickly drying up and for that reason it is now focusing on building nuclear reactors. Once the oil runs out Iran will be the only country in the Middle East that will be energy self-sufficient. All of the other Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia will become Third World impoverished states.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was also assassinated. He was found dead in the detention centre at The Hague tribunal. Mr Milosevic faced charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged central role in the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo during the 1990s. He also faced genocide charges over the 1992-95 Bosnia war, in which 100,000 people died.

Milosevic wrote a letter one day before his death claiming he was being poisoned to death in jail. An autopsy verified his claim as it showed that Milosevic’s body contained a drug that rendered his usual medication for high blood pressure and his heart condition ineffective, causing the heart attack that led to his death.

Former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson told reporters that he saw documents in 1992 that discussed assassinating Milosevic by means of a staged car accident, where the driver would be blinded by a flash of light and remote controlled brake failure enacted to cause the crash. This exact same technique was utilized for real in the murder of Princess Diana.

If Milosevic was murdered, who would ultimately be responsible? NATO. Why NATO? Because, though the ICTY (or ‘Hague Tribunal’) presents itself to the world as a UN body, NATO officials have themselves made clear, in public, that it really belongs to NATO. NATO appointed the prosecutors, and the judges who ruled out investigating any war crimes accusations against NATO. It follows that Slobodan Milosevic, who was a prisoner of the Hague Tribunal’s Scheveningen prison when he died, was a prisoner of NATO. NATO had both motive and opportunity to kill him.

In March 2002, Milosevic presented the NATO controlled Hague tribunal with FBI documents proving that both the United States government and NATO provided financial and military support for Al-Qaeda to aid the Kosovo Liberation Army in its war against Serbia. This didn’t go down too well at the Pentagon and the White House, who at the time were trying to sell a war on terror and gearing up to justify invading Iraq.

During Milosevic’s trial for war crimes NATO alleged that the Serbs had committed a massacre of Albanian civilians in the Kosovo town of Racak. Evidence presented in the court showed that NATO’s claim was a hoax. This is especially embarrassing because the allegation of a massacre at Racak was the excuse that NATO used to begin bombing the Serbs on 24 March 1999 (the carpet bombing were done by the United States Air Force -authorized by then president Bill and Hillary Clinton). Then NATO claimed that the Serbs had supposedly been murdering 100,000 Albanian civilians. However, NATO’s own forensics reported that they could not find even one body of an Albanian civilian murdered by Milosevic’s forces. The failure to find any bodies eventually led to NATO’s absurd claim that the Serbs had supposedly covered up the genocide by moving the many thousands of bodies in freezer trucks deep into Serbia (while Bill Clinton was carpet bombing the place) without leaving a single trace of evidence. But the Hague tribunal showed these accusations to be entirely fraudulent as well.

Milosevic made several speeches in which he discussed how a group of shadowy internationalists had caused the chaos in the Balkans because it was the next step on the road to a “new world order.”

During a February 2000 Serbian Congressional speech, Milosevic stated, “Small Serbia and people in it have demonstrated that resistance is possible. Applied at a broader level, it was organized primarily as a moral and political rebellion against tyranny, hegemony, monopolism, generating hatred, fear and new forms of violence and revenge against champions of freedom among nations and people, such a resistance would stop the escalation of modern time inquisition. Uranium bombs, computer manipulations, drug-addicted young assassins and bribed of blackmailed domestic thugs, promoted to the allies of the new world order, these are the instruments of inquisition which have surpassed, in their cruelty and cynicism, all previous forms of revengeful violence committed against the mankind in the past.”

Evidence linking Milosevic to genocides like Srebrenica, in which 7,000 Muslims died, was proven to be fraudulent. In fact, Srebrenica was a ‘UN safe zone’, yet just like Rwanda, UN peacekeepers deliberately withdrew and allowed the massacre to unfold, then blamed Milosevic. Milosevic’s exposure of UN involvement in the Srebrenica massacre was another reason why tribunal transcripts were heavily edited and censored by NATO, and another contributing factor for NATO to murder him while he was in their custody.

NATO’s Hague Tribunal was clearly a kangaroo court whose sole purpose was to convince ordinary people all over the world that NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia was justified. Since NATO failed to show this in its own court (a total absence of evidence did make this difficult), there is indeed a powerful NATO motive to murder Milosevic – to prevent his acquittal. In this way, NATO can continue to claim that Milosevic was guilty, and nobody would begin to look into the mountain of evidence that showed that it was NATO leaders (particularly US president Bill Clinton) who committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Yugoslavia.

So many people have been done in by cancer at a convenient time in history that it is now time to ask the question “who is assassinating people by giving their target cancer or inducing a massive heart attack”? Who ordered the hits and why?

Mr. Charles Senseney, a CIA weapon developer at Fort Detrick, Maryland, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 1975 where he described an umbrella poison dart gun he had made. He said it was always used in crowds with the umbrella open, firing through the webing so it would not attract attention. Since it was silent, no one in the crowd could hear it and the assassin merely would fold up the umbrella and saunter away with the crowd. Video footage of the assassination of John F Kennedy shows this umbrella gun being used in Dealey Plaza. Video evidence of the events of November 22, 1963 shows that the first shot fired on the fateful day had always seemed to have had a paralytic effect on Kennedy. His fists were clenched and his head, shoulders and arms seemed to stiffen. An autopsy revealed that there was a small entrance wound in his neck but no evidence of a bullet path through his neck and no bullet was ever recovered that matched that small size.

Charles Senseney testified that his Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick had received assignments from the CIA to develop exotic weaponry. One of the weapons was a hand-held dart gun that could shoot a poison dart into a guard dog to put it out of action for several hours. The dart and the poison left no trace so that examination would not reveal that the dogs had been put out of action. The CIA ordered about 50 of these weapons and used them operationally. Senseney said that the darts could have been used to kill human beings and he could not rule out the possibility that this had been done by the CIA.

A special type of poison developed for the CIA induces a heart attack and leaves no trace of any external influence unless an autopsy is conducted to check for this particular poison. The CIA revealed this poison in various accounts in the early 1970s. The CIA even revealed the weapon that fired those darts that induces a heart attack at a congressional hearing. The dart from this secret CIA weapon can penetrate clothing and leave nothing but a tiny red dot on the skin. On penetration of the deadly dart, the individual targeted for assassination may feel as if bitten by a mosquito, or they may not feel anything at all. The poisonous dart completely disintegrates upon entering the target. The lethal poison then rapidly enters the bloodstream causing a heart attack. Once the damage is done, the poison denatures quickly, so that an autopsy is very unlikely to detect that the heart attack resulted from anything other than natural causes. A former CIA agent disclosed that the darts were made of a frozen form of the liquid poison. She disclosed that the dart would melt within the target and would only leave a very tiny red dot at the entry point – the same type of small entrance wound that was found during the autopsy of John F Kennedy.

For over 50 years assassinations have been carried out so skillfully as to leave the impression that the victims died from natural causes. Details of some of the techniques used to achieve this were brought to light in 1961 when professional KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinskiy defected to the West and revealed that he had successfully performed two such missions. In 1957 he killed Ukrainian emigré writer Lev Rebet in Munich with a poison vapor gun which left the victim dead of an apparent heart attack. In 1959, the same type of weapon was used on Ukrainian emigré leader Stepan Bandera, although Bandera’s death was never fully accepted as having been from natural causes.

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

WTF? Everyone knows that any whistleblower suddenly dying of a "heart attack" is likely the victim of a PRESCISION STRIKE assassination operation.

The opening scene of the movie "THE INTERNATIONAL" shows this gun being used to murder a whistleblower and make it look like a heart attack.

In the movie Michael Clayton, another whistleblower is murdered by a "HEART ATTACK" injection like the ones used by THE ICEMAN (documentary link above)

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

It's the government's idea of a really bad day: Washington's Metro trains shut down. Seaport computers in New York go dark. Bloggers reveal locations of railcars with hazardous materials. Airport control towers are disrupted in Philadelphia and Chicago. Overseas, a mysterious liquid is found on London's subway.

And that's just for starters.

Those incidents were among dozens of detailed, mock disasters confronting officials rapid-fire in the U.S. government's biggest-ever "Cyber Storm" war game, according to hundreds of pages of heavily censored files obtained by The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department ran the exercise to test the nation's hacker defenses, with help from the State Department, Pentagon, Justice Department, CIA, National Security Agency and others.

The laundry list of fictional catastrophes which include hundreds of people on "No Fly" lists suddenly arriving at airport ticket counters is significant because it suggests what kind of real-world trouble keeps people in the White House awake at night.

Imagined villains include hackers, bloggers and even reporters. After mock electronic attacks overwhelmed computers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an unspecified "major news network" airing reports about the attackers refused to reveal its sources to the government. Other simulated reporters were duped into spreading "believable but misleading" information that worsened fallout by confusing the public and financial markets, according to the government's files. The $3 million, invitation-only war game simulated what the U.S. described as plausible attacks over five days in February 2006 against the technology industry, transportation lines and energy utilities by anti-globalization hackers. The government is organizing another multimillion-dollar war game, Cyber Storm 2, to take place in early March. "They point out where your expectations of your capabilities may be overstated," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the AP. "They may reveal to you things you haven't thought about. It's a good way of testing that you're going to do the job the way you think you were. It's the difference between doing drills and doing a scrimmage." The AP obtained the Cyber Storm internal records nearly two years after it requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. The government censored most of the 328 pages it turned over, marked "For Official Use Only," citing rules preventing the disclosure of sensitive information. "Definitely a challenging scenario," said Scott C. Algeier, who runs a cyber-defense group for leading technology companies, the Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center. For the participants including government officials from the United States, England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and executives from leading technology and transportation companies the mock disasters came fast and furious: Hacker break-ins at an airline; stolen commercial software blueprints; problems with satellite navigation systems; trouble with police radios in Montana; school closures in Washington, Miami and New York; computer failures at border checkpoints.

The incidents were divided among categories: computer attacks, physical attacks or psychological operations.

"We want to stress these players," said Jeffrey Wright, the former Cyber Storm director for the Homeland Security Department. "None of the players took 100 percent of the correct, right actions. If they had, we wouldn't have done our job as planners." How did they do? Reviews were mixed. Companies and governments worked successfully in some cases. But key players didn't understand the role of the premier U.S. organization responsible for fending off major cyber attacks, called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group, and it didn't have enough technical experts.

Also, the sheer number of mock attacks complicated defensive efforts. The little-known Cyber Response group, headed by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, represents the largest U.S. government departments including law enforcement and intelligence agencies and is the principal organization for responding to cyber attacks and recovering from them. The exercise had no impact on the real Internet. Officials said they were careful to simulate attacks only using isolated computers, working from basement offices at the Secret Service's headquarters in downtown Washington.

However, the government's files hint at a tantalizing mystery:

In the middle of the war game, someone quietly attacked the very computers used to conduct the exercise.

Perplexed organizers traced the incident to overzealous players and sent everyone an urgent e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" reminding them not to probe or attack the game computers.

"Any time you get a group of (information technology) experts together, there's always a desire, 'Let's show them what we can do,'" said George Foresman, a former senior Homeland Security official who oversaw Cyber Storm. "Whether its intent was embarrassment or a prank, we had to temper the enthusiasm of the players."

This video is from The Associated Press, broadcast January 31, 2008.[/size]

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

50 Year old message to the Press from a Dead President~~~~~~~~~~~~~For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.

If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that...

no war ever posed a greater threat to our security.

If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that

the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.

It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions--by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper.

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.

It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.

[...]

It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation--an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people--to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well--the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face.

No President should fear public scrutiny of his program.

For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition.

And both are necessary.

I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people.

For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers--I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: "An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed--

and no republic can survive.

That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy.

And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment-- the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants"--but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.

This means greater coverage and analysis of international news--for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security--and we intend to do it.

It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world's efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.

And so it is to the printing press--to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news--that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be:

free and independent.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

WASHINGTON — Hired in 2001 by the National Security Agency to help it catch up with the e-mail and cellphone revolution, Thomas A. Drake became convinced that the government’s eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on failed programs while ignoring a promising alternative.

He took his concerns everywhere inside the secret world: to his bosses, to the agency’s inspector general, to the Defense Department’s inspector general and to the Congressional intelligence committees. But he felt his message was not getting through.

So he contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.

Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, a veteran intelligence bureaucrat who collected early computers, faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice.

The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.

In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions. His administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press.

Mr. Drake was charged in April; in May, an F.B.I. translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing classified documents to a blogger; this week, the Pentagon confirmed the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to the Web site Wikileaks.org.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has renewed a subpoena in a case involving an alleged leak of classified information on a bungled attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program that was described in “State of War,” a 2006 book by James Risen. The author is a reporter for The New York Times. And several press disclosures since Mr. Obama took office have been referred to the Justice Department for investigation, officials said, though it is uncertain whether they will result in criminal cases.

As secret programs proliferated after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, were outspoken in denouncing press disclosures about the C.I.A.’s secret prisons and brutal interrogation techniques, and the security agency’s eavesdropping inside the United States without warrants.

In fact, Mr. Drake initially drew the attention of investigators because the government believed he might have been a source for the December 2005 article in The Times that revealed the wiretapping program.

Describing for the first time the scale of the Bush administration’s hunt for the sources of The Times article, former officials say 5 prosecutors and 25 F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case. The homes of three other security agency employees and a Congressional aide were searched before investigators raided Mr. Drake’s suburban house in November 2007. By then, a series of articles by Siobhan Gorman in The Baltimore Sun had quoted N.S.A. insiders about the agency’s billion-dollar struggles to remake its lagging technology, and panicky intelligence bosses spoke of a “culture of leaking.”

Though the inquiries began under President Bush, it has fallen to Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide whether to prosecute. They have shown no hesitation, even though Mr. Drake is not accused of disclosing the N.S.A.’s most contentious program, that of eavesdropping without warrants.

The Drake case epitomizes the politically charged debate over secrecy and democracy in a capital where the watchdog press is an institution even older than the spy bureaucracy, and where every White House makes its own calculated disclosures of classified information to reporters.

Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has long tracked the uneasy commerce in secrets between government officials and the press, said Mr. Drake might have fallen afoul of a bipartisan sense in recent years that leaks have gotten out of hand and need to be deterred. By several accounts, Mr. Obama has been outraged by some leaks, too.

“I think this administration, like every other administration, is driven to distraction by leaking,” Mr. Aftergood said. “And Congress wants a few scalps, too. On a bipartisan basis, they want these prosecutions to proceed.”

Though he is charged under the Espionage Act, Mr. Drake appears to be a classic whistle-blower whose goal was to strengthen the N.S.A.’s ability to catch terrorists, not undermine it. His alleged revelations to Ms. Gorman focused not on the highly secret intelligence the security agency gathers but on what he viewed as its mistaken decisions on costly technology programs called Trailblazer, Turbulence and ThinThread.

“The Baltimore Sun stories simply confirmed that the agency was ineptly managed in some respects,” said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of “The Secret Sentry,” a history of the N.S.A. Such revelations hardly damaged national security, Mr. Aid said.

Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that defends whistle-blowers, said the Espionage Act, written in 1917 for the pursuit of spies, should not be used to punish those who expose government missteps. “What gets lost in the calculus is that there’s a huge public interest in the disclosure of waste, fraud and abuse,” Ms. Radack said. “Hiding it behind alleged classification is not acceptable.”

Yet the government asserts that Mr. Drake was brazen in mishandling and sharing the classified information he had sworn to protect. He is accused of taking secret N.S.A. reports home, setting up an encrypted e-mail account to send tips to Ms. Gorman, collecting more data for her from unwitting agency colleagues, and then obstructing justice by deleting and shredding documents.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of “Necessary Secrets,” a book proposing criminal penalties not just for leakers but for journalists who print classified material, said that whatever his intentions, Mr. Drake must be punished.

“The system is plagued by leaks,” said Mr. Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization. “When you catch someone, you should make an example of them.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Matthew A. Miller, said the Drake case was not intended to deter government employees from reporting problems. “Whistle-blowers are the key to many, many department investigations — we don’t retaliate against them, we encourage them,” Mr. Miller said. “This indictment was brought on the merits, and nothing else.”

Though Mr. Obama began his presidency with a pledge of transparency, his aides have warned of a crackdown on leakers. In a November speech, the top lawyer for the intelligence agencies, Robert S. Litt, decried “leaks of classified information that have caused specific and identifiable losses of intelligence capabilities.” He promised action “in the coming months.”

Prosecutions like those of Mr. Drake; the F.B.I. translator, Shamai Leibowitz; and potentially Specialist Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, who has not yet been charged, have only a handful of precedents in American history. Among them are the cases of Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant who gave the Pentagon Papers to The Times in 1971, and Samuel L. Morison, a Navy analyst who passed satellite photographs to Jane’s Defense Weekly in 1984.

Under President Bush, no one was convicted for disclosing secrets directly to the press. But Lawrence A. Franklin, a Defense Department official, served 10 months of home detention for sharing classified information with officials of a pro-Israel lobbying group, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Mr. Cheney, was convicted of perjury for lying about his statements to journalists about an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson.

The F.B.I. has opened about a dozen investigations a year in recent years of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, according to a bureau accounting to Congress in 2007.

But most such inquiries are swiftly dropped, usually because hundreds of government employees had access to the leaked information and identifying the source seems impossible. Often even a determined hunt fails to find the source, and agencies sometimes oppose prosecution for fear that even more secrets will be disclosed at a trial.

By Justice Department rules, investigators may seek to question a journalist about his sources only after exhausting other options and with the approval of the attorney general. Subpoenas have been issued for reporters roughly once a year over the last two decades, according to Justice Department statistics, but such actions are invariably fought by news organizations and spark political debate over the First Amendment.

The reporter in the Drake case, Ms. Gorman, who now works at The Wall Street Journal, was never contacted by the Justice Department, according to two people briefed on the investigation. With Mr. Drake’s own statements to the F.B.I. in five initial months of cooperation, along with his confiscated computers and documents, investigators believed they could prove their case without her. Prosecutors further simplified their task by choosing to charge Mr. Drake not with transferring classified material to Ms. Gorman but with a different part of the espionage statute: illegal “retention” of classified information.

An Air Force veteran who drove an electric car, Mr. Drake has long worked on the boundary between technology and management. After years as an N.S.A. contractor, he was hired as an employee and turned up for his first day of work on Sept. 11, 2001. His title at the time hints at the baffling layers of N.S.A. bureaucracy, with more than 30,000 employees at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters alone: “Senior Change Leader/Chief, Change Leadership & Communications Office, Signals Intelligence Directorate.”

Chris Frappier, a close friend since high school in Vermont, described Mr. Drake then as fascinated by technology and international affairs, socially awkward, with “an incredible sense of duty and honor.”

When he read the indictment, said Mr. Frappier, now a legal investigator in Vermont, he recognized his old friend.

“It’s just so Tom,” Mr. Frappier said. “He saw something he thought was wrong, and he thought it had to be stopped.”

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Drake became a champion of ThinThread, a pilot technology program designed to filter the flood of telephone, e-mail and Web traffic that the N.S.A. collects. He believed it offered effective privacy protections for Americans, too.

But agency leaders rejected ThinThread and chose instead a rival program called Trailblazer, which was later judged an expensive failure and abandoned. Mr. Drake and some allies kept pressing the case for ThinThread but were rebuffed, according to former agency officials.

“It was a pretty sharp battle within the agency,” said a former senior intelligence official. “The ThinThread guys were a very vocal minority.”

One former N.S.A. consultant recalled “alarmist memos and e-mails” from Mr. Drake, including one that declared of the agency: “The place is almost completely corrupted.”

Mr. Drake, whom friends describe as a dogged, sometimes obsessive man, took his complaints about ThinThread and other matters to a series of internal watchdogs. He developed a close relationship with intelligence committee staff members, including Diane S. Roark, who tracked the security agency for the House Intelligence Committee. She discussed with Mr. Drake the possibility of contacting Ms. Gorman, according to people who know Ms. Roark.

The subsequent investigation, which included a search of Ms. Roark’s house, devastated Mr. Drake, his wife — herself an N.S.A. contractor — and their teenage son.

“For Tom Drake, a man who loves his country and has devoted most of his life to serving it, this is particularly painful,” said his lawyer, James Wyda, the federal public defender for Maryland. “We feel that the government is wrong on both the facts alleged and the principles at stake in such a prosecution.”

Forced in 2008 out of his job at the National Defense University, where the security agency had assigned him, Mr. Drake took a teaching job at Strayer University. He lost that job after the indictment and now works at an Apple computer store. He spends his evenings, friends say, preparing his defense and pondering the problems of N.S.A., which still preoccupy him.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

GOP Rep. asks Clinton to declare WikiLeaks a ‘foreign terrorist organization’http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/gop-rep-wikileaks-deemed-foreign-terrorist-organization/[NOTE: Peter King is saying that now confirmed terrorist Hilary Clinton has the power to declare anyone a 'foreign terrorist organization'? Perhaps Peter needs to review the CONSTITUTION which he took an oath to protect against enemies foreign and domestic!]By Stephen C. WebsterSunday, November 28th, 2010 -- 7:20 pm

A Republican Congressman from New York has invented a new definition for the word "terrorism" that doesn't require guns, bombs, vast underground networks of sleeper cells, a criminal conspiracy or even violence. All that's needed to be a terrorist, according to Rep. Peter King, is a website and some inconvenient information. That's why King sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder on Sunday, demanding that whistleblower website WikiLeaks be deemed a "foreign terrorist organization" and it's founder declared a terror ringleader. "To me they are a clear and present enemy to the United States of America," he told a CBS radio reporter on Sunday. King said the website's release of sensitive -- but not "top secret" -- US diplomatic cables was "worse than a military attack." Declaring the site a "terrorist" group, King suggested, would allow the US "to seize their funds and go after anyone who provides them with any help or contributions or assistance whatsoever." He also called for site founder Julian Assange to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. That may prove difficult, however, given that WikiLeaks did not steal any of the documents it released to the media -- they was given to them by a whistleblower, allegedly a young soldier named Bradley Manning. That sequence of events, of a whistleblower contacting a high profile news venue with explosive information that needs to be made public, happens in newsrooms all across the country every week. Though inconvenient for officials, the revelation of information contained in any of the WikiLeaks files, much like the Pentagon Papers amid the Vietnam war, is crucial to maintaining an enlightened public -- a point the US Supreme Court made abundantly clear in New York Times Co. v. United States in 1971. "In seeking injunctions against these newspapers and in its presentation to the Court, the Executive Branch seems to have forgotten the essential purpose and history of the First Amendment," Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas wrote, taking the side of the Times, which had recently published what was then considered the largest cache of secret military information in US history. "In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy," they continued. "The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." After the release of the Pentagon Papers, Justices Black and Douglas opined that "newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do." According to Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks has done just the same. Concurring with the court's majority, Justice Potter Stewart added: "In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry - in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For without an informed and free press there cannot be an enlightened people." “[The WikiLeaks] documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match," the Times added. “The Attorney General and I don’t always agree on different issues, but I believe on this one, he and I strongly agree that there should be a criminal prosecution [of WikiLeaks],” Rep. King told CBS radio. Attorney General Holder has not made any announcement regarding a criminal prosecution of the site or it's founder. The White House strongly condemned the site's actions on Sunday, calling the publication of State Dept. documents a continuation of a violation of law. King's call for prosecution was echoed Sunday by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-GA), Clair McCaskill (D-MO) and former State Department official Liz Cheney. Julian Assange is currently wanted for questioning by Swedish authorities who are investigating a claim of rape and molestation. Assange has maintained that the charges are baseless and part of a campaign to discredit him.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

The Examiner learned in communications from human rights defenders and independent journalists throughout Monday that they were shaken with news of 1300 Libyans killed and 5000 wounded Saturday, plus, the U.S. allegedly ordered Targeted Killings of Voltaire Network reporters, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya and Thierry Meyssan, non-mainstream reporters in Libya covering the NATO war, while other independent reporters there are being fired upon and, according to ABC, journalist Mohammed Nabbous was killed Saturday. In a KPFA radio interview with journalist Don DeBar, he reported most mainstream "news" about Libya has been untrue, as alternative news sites' reporters heavily report, but are increasingly persecuted according to their recent reports.

The reporter who may have known too much, slain and what the U.S. is hiding

"The conflict in Libya has claimed the life of another journalist. A sniper shot Mohammed Nabbous, 28-year old resident of Benghazi and founder of its first independent TV news channel Libya Alhurra, on Saturday night," reported ABC's Mark Colvin on Monday.

As Naboous was filming attacks in Benghazi, he was shot, soon after the regime said it was honouring a ceasefire, according to ABC.

"You may have heard Mohammed Nabbous on this program on Friday when he reported an attack on a power station outside Benghazi," Colvin wrote.

Within days of NATO bombings on Libya, Nabbous reportedly had a team of "citizen reporters," shooting video reports all around Benghazi that he was posting on his channel Libya Alhurra.

"He was also an important source for foreign networks like Al Jazeera, CNN and NPR who regularly interviewed him and rebroadcast his videos. We also relied on his video updates to confirm stories coming out of Benghazi," stated Colvin for ABC.

The sense of despair expressed by Human Rights advocates and independent journalists from various points around the globe in communications to the Examiner on Monday as word spread about the recent NATO massacres on Libyans, unreported by mainstream news, and the targeting of independent reporters.

Monday, cheers reported in some corners were not heard from human rights workers when mainstream reported Tripoli had falling under what independent reporters say, has been falsely reported on mainstream news.

"What is needed right now is not despair on our part, but the dissemination of information, which NATO has decided is the most important battleground," stated independent journalist, WBAIX radio announcer Don DeBar, formerly with NPR's WBAI.

DeBar told Dupré in communications early Tuesday that Nabbous, unlike painted by ABC, was "clearly a U.S. agent."

"He founded Libya's version of al-Hurra," said DeBar.

According to Wikipedia "Alhurra (or al-Hurra) (Arabic: الحرّة‎, al-Ḥurrah [alˈħurra],[note] 'The free') is a United States-based satellite TV channel, sponsored by the U.S. government..."

"The station is forbidden from broadcasting itself within the U.S. under the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act concerning the broadcast of propaganda." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Nabbous and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhurra)

"Now the Russians, who conduct satellite surveillance of planet Earth, because they have been prepared for 50 years for a nuclear strike from the United States, said that, on the specific dates that [Gadaffi] charges were delineated that [he] had attacked his people from the air, here are the photographs: there are no planes in the air, there were no aeral activities conducted whatsoever. (Watch: 'US liable for civilian deaths in Libya', Press TV, August 22, 2011)

"This has not made the media in the west at all - including on programs like Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera which is carried on progressive radio networks, if you can believe that, in the United States," he told Press TV.

DeBar wrote Tuesday, "Coverage of the situation in Libya over the past three days, while useless to anyone trying to understand what is actually happening in Libya, nevertheless provides an interesting peek into the modus operandi of the global media that has broad application for the decoding of its coverage of all of the issues that touch our lives." (See: "Media Wars - Many Mouths, One Voice: Libya Coverage Provides a Peek Behind the Curtain," Don DeBar, August 23, 2011)

Targeted Individual reporters for Targeted Killings

The Réseau Voltaire, (Voltaire Network), an international non-profit organisation independent news group, based in Paris, released a brief statement late on Monday about its two journalists in Libya targeted for killings. (Also see: "Obama targeted killings lawsuit spotlights American civilians," Dupré, D. Examiner, September 2, 2010)

"From the Rixos [Hotel], the order was given by so-called "journalists" from the U.S. to bring down Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya and Thierry Meyssan."

The statement was released in an short newsletter by Voltaire news group saying that the individuals who gave the orders "have been identified and their names will be released in due course."

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization, and Thierry Meyssan, is president and founder of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference.

Both Nazemroaya and Meyssan are entrenched in Hotel Rixos, the Voltaire news group reported in a written statement.

The targeted killing threats of the independent journalists highlight President Obama's signed Executive Order that the Center for Constitutional Rights defined as "an extrajudicial killing policy under which names are added to CIA and military 'kill lists' through a secret executive process and stay there for months at a time.

This policy 'is plainly not limited to imminent threats" the Center for Constitutional Rights had said in September 2010.

"After the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon began a shift away from its late Cold War–era 'two-war strategy,' premised on maintaining the ability to conduct two major military operations simultaneously, and began to focus instead on irregular warfare against individuals and groups." (Emphasis added; Sharon Weinberger, Black Ops: Secret Military Technology in the Age of Terrorism, August 3, 2010)

Weinberger furthers, "The head of U.S. Special Operations Command talks about 'high-tech manhunting,' while Air Force officials describe plans to compress the 'kill chain.'" (Dupré, September 2, 2010)

An interview conducted early Monday morning with Voltaire's Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya showed him in hiding, and trapped in Tripoli. (See embedded Youtube.)

"I'm confined in a place where I can't move," cleary unnerved and appearing to be in a very small space as he spoke, Nazemroaya said.

He described, partially in graphic details, some of the traumatizing events he has seen including massacres by NATO and the children.

"There have been massive, -- atrocious, -- criminal bombings" against the Libyan people he emphatically reported.

"I didn't sleep the other night because the bombings would not stop."

He asked how mainstream reporters can be reporting on what is happening out on the streets when they are in the hotel with him.

The Réseau, (Voltaire Network), according to Wkipedia:

"... systematically attacked the Bush and Sharon administrations. According to the Réseau, the United States are a "hyperpower", a term forged by former minister Hubert Védrine, and all international relations are strongly dependent on the attitude of the concerned nations toward the USA. Thus, any analysis quickly comes back to the USA which they accuse of trying to establish a "new world order", which was the exact formulation that George H.W. Bush used on September 11, 1990 in front of Congress on the 49th anniversary of the Pentagon´s groundbreaking.

In an email, WBAIX radio's Don DeBar, who has remained in regular communications with several independent reporters in Libya, covered Libya there on the ground in 2009, and then, the covered the war on Libyans since its onset, concurred with Nazemroaya about mainstream journalists there.

"Most reporting is being done from inside or near the journalists' hotels," DeBar stated.

"Outside the primary location, snipers have fired at - and in one case, shot - non-mainstream journalists."

According to DeBar, only reporters "embedded with the invaders" have been permitted to shoot footage outdoors.

Libya's media has had its power cut off, so is off the air he said.

In his August 23 report, DeBar wrote:"The manufacture of events in Libya has been underway since the lead-up to the US-led invasion, including the narrative that enabled the UN resolutions 1970 and 1973 - prominent among these were the claim that the Libyan government was conducting an aerial war against protestors, countered by satellite evidence from the Russian military showing no such attacks took place, and the claim that African mercenaries were firing on protestors, which was both untrue and provoked racist killings of Libyans with African features and skin by rebel gangs." On Press TV, DeBar stated about NATO's war on Libyans, "This is the second stop for AFRICOM [Africa Command], the first direct stop for AFRICOM under Obama's regime.

"AFRICOM came online about two months before he was elected but after Cote D'Ivoire - where they carried the elected president out of the country at gunpoint, the French did, the former colonial power - this episode began.

"And Libya has played - if you want to believe Nelson Mandela - Libya played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa, and Muammar Gaddafi in particular played a major role in doing that. He has been active in building a communications infrastructure and a financial infrastructure owned by Africa in Africa."

Peddling Libya War as popular uprising when Libya had human rights obsrerved, unlike Americans having rights violated

Press TV asked DeBar, "If the Gaddafi regime has totally fallen, or will fall, how likely is it that the Libyan people will actually go further towards independence and be freer people as a lot of them who have been in the streets, and they have been showing some of them today, are saying? What's the likely scenario in your perspective?

DeBar answered, "The likely scenario is colonialism, and the reason for the invasion of Libya is that Libya was one of the places organizing against colonialism of the continent of Africa."

Early Monday morning, when KPFA's Davey D interviewed DeBar about the real on-the-ground situation in Tripoli, DeBar said the war on Libya was peddled as a popular uprising, but Libyans, unlike Americans, have no reason to rebel against their government. (See: Don DeBar, "LIBYA: The Real Deal" Youtube.)

"Unlike Americans," he said, "everyone in Libya owns their own home, a human right -- as well as free education, free health care comparable to the U.S. hospitals, affordable and widely available food - unlike Americans have," he said.

DeBar said on Press TV:

"The people of Libya, by the way, went from being the poorest people on the planet in 1969, by every objective measure, to having the highest standard of living in Africa, and one of the highest standards of living in the Muslim world - housing is owned by the people, free of any mortgages, everyone. It is a human right there under the law - and the entire education system and free healthcare." (Press TV Transcript)

In Tripoli, "relentless NATO bombings resumed around 10:20 Monday morning against certain objectives that independent reporters say is a massacre," according to Voltaire.

The fighting also resumed around the Rixos Hotel where some Libyan leaders along with the foreign journalists are entrenched.

DeBar said he has been told by some journalists stuck in the hotel, who have been able to call around the city to the many residents they know personally:

"The invaders have been largely turned back. They arrived under severe aerial attacks across the city, including strafing of civilians intended to clear the streets for the invasion.

"They were supplemented with troop landings from NATO naval vessels in the port. This was apparently the source of many of the Qatari personnel."Three states have offered diplomatic protection to the Voltaire Network team of reporters in Libya the news group stated.

"However, trapped in the city, they have no way of reaching the respective embassies."

Turn of media events late Monday evening

On Monday, DeBar urged people to visit his Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/don.debar where he keeps a long string of information needing to be shared, "especially those in, or in contact with people in, Libya," he stated late Monday.

In a dramatic turn of events late Monday night, The Washington Post published an article about the reporting contradictions.

"Forces loyal to the fugitive Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi struck back Monday against the rebel fighters who had swept euphorically into the capital the night before, forcing them to retreat from several strategic locations and tempering hopes that the battle for Tripoli was all but over."

"The dramatic appearance Monday night of Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam at the Rixos hotel, where the Tripoli-based press corps remains trapped, contradicted the rebels’ assertion the day before that they had captured him and cast into doubt their claim of controlling 80 percent of the capital."

DeBar told Dupré in a private email that his Press TV interview was recorded at 2:30 pm New York time on Monday, Auguest 22, 2011.

"At that time, I questioned the veracity of the claimed capture of Gadaffi's sons and of rebel control of the city of Tripoli. It turns out I was right."

"No, I don't have a crystal ball - just good contacts on the ground who don't lie or hold their tongues when they see horrible wrong being done. NATO - that's Obama to the apologists - has done everything to keep this information from you, but the truth will out!"

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said Wednesday that a program put in place to combat U.S. citizens engaged in terrorism may be expanded to include journalists.

Speaking before the National Press Club, the Republican presidential candidate again criticized President Barack Obama for approving last week’s drone strikes in Yemen against Anwar al-Awlaki who was tracked and executed based on secret intelligence that linked him to two failed terrorist attacks against the U.S.

Mr. Paul said the latest drone strike represented an expansion of presidential power that could theoretically be expanded to include journalists and other U.S. citizens.

“Can you imagine being put on a list because you’re a threat? What’s going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? … This is the way this works. It’s incrementalism,” Mr. Paul said. “It’s slipping and sliding, let me tell you.”

The comment is the latest from the Texas Republican concerning the killing of al-Awlaki. Speaking earlier this week, Mr. Paul condemned the killing, saying he would consider impeaching President Obama.

“He can now assassinate people without due process–American citizens–and people cheer him. What is going on with this country?” Mr. Paul said.

Representative Ron Paul suggested before the National Press Club October 5 that President Obama's assassination program of alleged terrorists could grow into an assassination program for journalists who disagree with the federal government.

"Can you imagine being put on a list because you're a threat?" the GOP presidential contender asked. "What's going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? Or a professor becomes a threat? Someday that could well happen. This is the way it works. It's incrementalism.... It's slipping and sliding, let me tell you." Paul's remarks were a reaction to a September 30 drone strike in Yemen authorized by President Obama which targeted and killed two American citizens, one of whom — Anwar al-Awlaki — had been on a presidential assassination list for more than a year.

Indeed, both Awlaki — a New Mexico native — and his fellow U.S. citizen killed in the drone strike, Samir Khan, were journalists. Awlaki served as the primary video propagandist for al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), an organization which did not exist on September 11, 2001. The South Carolina-born Khan served as editor of Inspire magazine, the English language propaganda magazine of AQAP launched in 2010 from Yemen.

Awlaki openly used his videos to justify terrorist attacks against the United States, but he denied participating in the actual planning of terrorist events. President Obama claimed the opposite in a statement September 30, alleging that "He directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009. He directed the failed attempt to blow up U.S. cargo planes in 2010." However, President Obama and his staff have steadfastly refused to release any evidence of the President's allegations.

Paul stressed that he didn't invent the word "assassination" policy for Obama's program, noting that the term was coined by Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair. "A lot of people are having second thoughts about this policy," noted Paul. "This was an announced policy in February of 2010 by Dennis Blair. And he used the word 'assassination.' Sometimes on the media they'll say, 'Oh, Ron Paul says he was assassinated. Where did he come up with that word?' From Dennis Blair, who said that that is now our policy." The word "assassination" has been attributed to Blair's testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence February 3, 2010, and indeed that was the substance of Blair's remarks, though the word does not appear to be on the official publicly released transcript.

Paul noted that the American system of law has traditionally been based upon trials, rather than gangland-style Mafia hits. He recalled that this happened even with the worst war criminals during World War II. “All the Nazi criminals were tried. They were taken to court and then executed,” Paul said. “The reason we do this is because we want to protect the rule of law.”

Over at the Ron Paul 2012 campaign website, official blogger Jack Hunter found that Paul has some high-powered conservative legal support for trials rather than a presidential license to kill — in Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia wrote in a 2004 decision, "Where the Government accuses a citizen of waging war against it, our constitutional tradition has been to prosecute him in federal court for treason or some other crime…" Scalia, favorably quoting British legal scholar William Blackstone, also claimed, “To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom…”

Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1753), from which Scalia quoted, was widely read by America's Founding Fathers, and he was among the most quoted men at the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Hunter's quote of Scalia was from a 2004 dissent in the case of Louisiana native Yaser el-Hamdi, who had been detained indefinitely by the Bush administration at a military brig in South Carolina. Hunter's citation was perhaps a biased selection, in that Scalia heavily weighed the fact that Hamdi's physical location was within the continental United States: "A view of the Constitution that gives the Executive authority to use military force rather than the force of law against citizens on American soil flies in the face of the mistrust that engendered these provisions," Scalia wrote.

But Scalia also added that American citizens are different from foreign combatants in war, stressing that "the tradition with respect to American citizens, however, has been quite different. Citizens aiding the enemy have been treated as traitors subject to the criminal process." In other words, Scalia's basic argument was that alleged traitors have traditionally been given a trial and not been imprisoned or killed without any due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and its Fifth and Sixth Amendments.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.Murder Inc.Execution By Secret WH Committeehttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29316.htmBy Glenn Greenwald

October 06, 2011 "Salon" - - Here is what the Democratic President has created and implemented, and what many party loyalists explicitly endorse (when there’s a Democrat in the White House) — from Reuters:

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions . . . .

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council . . . . Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate. . . . The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process. . . .

Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing. The process involves “going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president” . . . .Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described. They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC “principals,” meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval . . . But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals’ decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

So a panel operating out of the White House — that meets in total secrecy, with no known law or rules governing what it can do or how it operates — is empowered to place American citizens on a list to be killed by the CIA, which (by some process nobody knows) eventually makes its way to the President, who is the final Decider. It is difficult to describe the level of warped authoritarianism necessary to cause someone to lend their support to a twisted Star Chamber like that; I genuinely wonder whether the Good Democrats doing so actually first convince themselves that if this were the Bush White House’s hit list, or if it becomes Rick Perry’s, they would be supportive just the same. Seriously: if you’re willing to endorse having White House functionaries meet in secret — with no known guidelines, no oversight, no transparency — and compile lists of American citizens to be killed by the CIA without due process, what aren’t you willing to support?

Of all the things I’ve seen over the past several years, easily one of the most repellent has been the number of people — especially journalists — who are running around definitively asserting that Awlaki had an “operational role” in Terrorist plots and had “taken up arms” against the U.S. even though they have no idea whether that’s actually true (Politico‘s Roger Simon: “U.S. citizen living overseas and plotting the death of American citizens from, let’s say, Yemen, you can say hello to our little friends, the 100-lb. Hellfires”; Josh Marshall: Awlaki was “a key leader of an international terrorist group, organizing and inspiring terrorist attacks within the US” ). Just consider how even the anonymous government officials who spoke to Reuters in order to defend the Awlaki killing characterize the “evidence” they have to support that claim:

The Obama administration has not made public an accounting of the classified evidence that Awlaki was operationally involved in planning terrorist attacks.

But officials acknowledged that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.

For instance, one plot in which authorities have said Awlaki was involved Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day 2009 with a bomb hidden in his underpants.

There is no doubt Abdulmutallab was an admirer or follower of Awlaki, since he admitted that to U.S. investigators. . . . But at the time the White House was considering putting Awlaki on the U.S. target list, intelligence connecting Awlaki specifically to Abdulmutallab and his alleged bomb plot was partial. Officials said at the time the United States had voice intercepts involving a phone known to have been used by Awlaki and someone who they believed, but were not positive, was Abdulmutallab.

Someone spoke to someone on “a phone known to have been used by Awlaki”: maybe it was Abdulmutallab, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was Awlaki, maybe it wasn’t. Who knows? Who cares? Some officials “believed” it may have involved those two, so it’s time to kill Awlaki. Remember, Good Democrats hate the death penalty because they think it’s so terribly barbaric to execute people whose guilt is in doubt (even if, unlike Awlaki, they’ve enjoyed an indictment and full jury trial, lawyers, the right to examine evidence and to confront witnesses, multiple appeals, and habeas petitions). There’s also this:

Awlaki was also implicated in a case in which a British Airways employee was imprisoned for plotting to blow up a U.S.-bound plane. E-mails retrieved by authorities from the employee’s computer showed what an investigator described as ” operational contact” between Britain and Yemen.

Authorities believe the contacts were mainly between the U.K.-based suspect and his brother. But there was a strong suspicion Awlaki was at the brother’s side when the messages were dispatched.

There was a “strong suspicion” — not that Awlaki participated in this email plotting, but that he was “at the side” of someone who did. Who needs “beyond a reasonable doubt’? That is so pre-9/11. ”A strong suspicion” that he may have been next to someone plotting an attack: that’s the McCarthyite standard Democratic Party loyalists are holding up to justify the due-process-free execution of their fellow citizen by a secret, lawless White House “panel.”

What’s crucial to keep in mind is that nobody can see this “evidence” which these anonymous government officials are claiming exists. It’s in their exclusive possession. As a result, they’re able to characterize it however they want, to present it in the best possible light to support their pro-assassination position, and to prevent any detection of its flaws. As any lawyer will tell you, anyone can make a case for anything when they’re in exclusive possession of all the relevant evidence and are the only side from whom one is hearing; all evidence becomes less compelling when it’s subjected to adversarial scrutiny. Yet even given all those highly favorable pro-government conditions here, it’s obvious — even these officials admit — that the evidence is “partial,” “patchy,” based on “suspicions” rather than knowledge.

But no matter. Officials in the Obama White House and then the President decreed in secret that Awlaki should die. So the U.S. Government killed him. Republicans who always cheer acts of violence against Muslims are joined by Democrats who reflexively cheer what this Democratic President does, and now this death panel for U.S. citizens — operating with no known rules, transparency, or oversight — is entrenched as bipartisan consensus and a permanent fixture of American political life. I’m sure this will never be abused: unrestrained power exercised in secret has a very noble history in the U.S. (Reuters says that the only American they could confirm on the hit list is Awlaki, though Dana Priest reported last year that either three or four Americans were on a hit list).

Anyway, look over there: wasn’t it outrageous how George Bush imprisoned people without any due process and tried to seize unrestrained power, and isn’t it horrifying what a barbaric death cult Republicans are for favoring executions even when there’s doubt about guilt? Even for those deeply cynical about American political culture: wouldn’t you have thought a few years ago that having the President create a White House panel to place Americans on a CIA hit list — in secret, without a shred of due process — would be a bridge too far?

UPDATE: I don’t think it’s dispositive of the question here — because the U.S. Government isn’t permitted to murder fugitives who aren’t violently resisting apprehension and, in any event, Awlaki was never a fugitive since he was never indicted by the U.S. for anything — but Robert Farley persuasively highlights the baselessness of the excuse that Awlaki could not have been apprehended (and he also documents how dubious, uncertain and filled with doubt is the case against Awlaki generally).

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

-Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

-Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

-Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

-Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

-Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

-Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

-Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

-Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

-Somehow torture is tolerated.

-Somehow lying is tolerated.

-Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

-Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

-Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

-Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

-Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

-Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

-Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

-Somehow this is tolerated.

-Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

According to the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, Americans are never to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Constitution is not some aspirational statement of values, allowing exceptions when convenient, but rather, it is the law of the land. It is the basis of our Republic and our principal bulwark against tyranny.

Last week’s assassination of two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, is an outrage and a criminal act carried out by the President and his administration. If the law protecting us against government-sanctioned assassination can be voided when there is a “really bad American”, is there any meaning left to the rule of law in the United States? If, as we learned last week, a secret government committee, not subject to congressional oversight or judicial review, can now target certain Americans for assassination, under what moral authority do we presume to lecture the rest of the world about protecting human rights? Didn’t we just bomb Libya into oblivion under the auspices of protecting the civilians from being targeted by their government? Timothy McVeigh was certainly a threat, as were Nidal Hassan and Jared Lee Loughner. They killed people in front of many witnesses. They took up arms against their government in a literal way, yet were still afforded trials. These constitutional protections are in place because our Founders realized it is a very serious matter to deprive any individual of life or liberty. Our outrage against even the obviously guilty is not worth the sacrifice of the rule of law. Al-Awlaki has been outspoken against the United States and we are told he encouraged violence against Americans. We do not know that he actually committed any acts of violence. Ironically, he was once invited to the Pentagon as part of an outreach to moderate Muslims after 9/11. As the US attacks against Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia expanded, it is said that he became more fervent and radical in his opposition to US foreign policy.

Many cheer this killing because they believe that in a time of war, due process is not necessary – not even for citizens, and especially not for those overseas. However, there has been no formal declaration of war and certainly not one against Yemen. The post-9/11 authorization for force would not have covered these two Americans because no one is claiming they had any connection to that attack. Al-Awlaki was on a kill list compiled by a secret panel within President Obama’s National Security Council and Justice Department.

How many more Americans citizens are on that list?

They won’t tell us.

What are the criteria?

They won’t tell us.

Where is the evidence?

They won’t tell us.

Al-Awlaki’s father tried desperately to get the administration to at least allow his son to have legal representation to challenge the “kill” order. He was denied. Rather than give him his day in court, the administration, behind closed doors, served as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.The most worrisome aspect of this is that any new powers this administration accrues will serve as precedents for future administrations. Even those who completely trust this administration must understand that if this usurpation of power and denial of due process is allowed to stand, these powers will remain to be expanded on by the next administration and then the next. Will you trust them? History shows that once a population gives up its rights, they are not easily won back. Beware.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Was the assassination of Breitbart a false flag to allow neocons to pressure Obama into approving a false flag or approve the mas murdering of millions of Iranians?

Will the assassination of Breitbart be used this way even if it was not a false flag.

Look how much Bilderberg will allow only the neocons to talk about the assassination of Breitbart, once they stop you will know that a deal has been cut.

Every journalist in the world should be exposing this assassination, the fake left is playing right into the 'bomb iran' plans by trying to cover up the murder.

Neocons also probably agreed to backstap Sheriff Arpaio as well.

The New World Order eats its own, if an IBM computer calculates that the benefit of killing one of their own will assist in protecting public myths then chances are that person will be added to the WH kill list.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

The news conference of Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate yielded one fascinating back story. This is a story which has received no media coverage, but it deserves to get out.

We are all still dealing with the shock of our friend and Patriot Andrew Breitbart’s sudden death. Andrew was, as Rush Limbaugh say, a bulldog for the truth.

This back story is about Andrew’s last hours. In those last hours he was working with Sheriff Arpaio to get the truth about Obama’s fraudulent birth certificate out to a wider audience.

We filmed this amazing clip of Dr Jerome Corsi talking about Andrew’s last interview before his tragic death. It show’s he was in the fight until his last breath. We admire this man more than we can express.Reader Cheryl: "Breitbart Connection Revelation.." http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=232165Posted By: Jordon [Send E-Mail]Date: Thursday, 1-Mar-2012 17:36:50

In Response To: Was Andrew Breitbart Murdered by the Obama Regime? (Jordon)

Re: Was Andrew Breitbart Murdered by the Obama....

4:16pm EST, March 1, 2012

Breitbart Connection Revelation:

The livestream press conference broadcast by World Net Daily (wnd.com) from Arizona with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, his lead investigator (didn't get his name), and Jerome Corsi has just concluded, presenting the documented evidence that both the Obama birth certificate released online by the White House, and the Selective Service Registration Card, with a date stamp from the United States Postal Service, reveal undisputable evidence of forgery and fraud. There are also signed affidavits in Sheriff Arpaio's files. The first 15 minutes of the livestream video could not be understood, because of audio and visual buffering problems. These problems were completely resolved by the 16-minute mark, and the broadcast then continued without interruption for the following hour.

The Breitbart Connection: Mr. Jerome Corsi reported live on the video that Sheriff Arpaio gave an interview to Andrew Brietbart hours before Mr. Breitbart's death on Wednesday, February 29th, and Mr. Corsi described this as "the last interview" Mr. Breitbart ever conducted.

Other key points were revealed. There is "a person of interest" known to the Arpaio investigators whose name has not yet been released, regarding the fraudulent manufacturing of the birth certificate. The manufacturer of the computer which was used has been identified, but that specific information has not yet been released either.

Signed,

Cheryl, A Reader

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Marketing executive Arthur Sando tells THR about his lengthy debate with the conservative activist at The Brentwood; they said goodbye around 11:30 p.m., 50 minutes before Breitbart was pronounced dead.

Andrew Breitbart spent his final hours much like he lived most of his life: passionately talking politics.

Breibart, the 43-year-old conservative pundit and provocateur who died suddenly early Thursday while walking near his Los Angeles home, had stopped into The Brentwood, a nearby bar and restaurant. There, he struck up a conversation with Arthur Sando, a marketing executive who didn't know Breitbart but likely was the last person to talk extensively with him before he died.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sando says he arrived at the bar in the tony Brentwood section of L.A. around 10 p.m. and soon the empty seat next to his was filled by a man with a familiar face.

"I tried to figure out how I knew him," says Sando, a veteran publicity and marketing executive who works for dietary supplement company MonaVie and has worked at CBS, King World Prods and Turner Broadcasting. "He was on his BlackBerry. And I said 'Andrew?' I told him I had seen his work."

Sando says the duo quickly struck up a conversation that would last a little less than two hours.

"He was friendly and engaging," Sando recalls. "I said, 'You can't be very happy with the slate of Republican candidates' and he said, 'Why would you say that?' I said, 'Well, they're talking about contraception,' and he said, 'The conversation is being framed by the liberal media.' I said, 'Well, the media isn't writing Rick Santorum’s speeches for him.' We had a back-and-forth for awhile until we said we weren’t going to agree on some things."

The friendly debate continued in the bar as Breitbart sipped red wine, says Sando. "We just hit it off, he was delightful. There were other people who sat down and joined the conversation."

Sando also mentioned that he hadn't seen Breitbart as a guest on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher recently; Breitbart told Sando he enjoyed going on Maher's show because it taught him how to deal with a hostile audience and how to react when getting booed.

Breitbart had stopped in for a drink but wasn't there to meet anyone in particular, Sando says. Nor were there any signs of health or other problems.

"He wasn’t drinking excessively," Sando recalls. "He was on his BlackBerry a lot."

After the two hours, Breitbart said he was leaving. "We exchanged contact information," Sando says. "We were going to get together."

Sando says he was "shocked" to read Thursday morning that Breitbart, who had a history of heart problems, had collapsed while on a walk near his home in the same neighborhood as the bar. Breitbart was rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead at 12:19 a.m., according to Reuters, less than an hour after leaving The Brentwood.

The exact cause of death has not been revealed but initial reports said it was natural causes.

"There were no signs that anything was wrong," says Sando. "It's very sad."

Logged

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40

...Breitbart, 43, died after collapsing shortly after midnight during a walk near his home. He was rushed to the emergency room at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

He suffered heart problems a year earlier, but his father-in-law, actor Orson Bean, said he could not pinpoint what happened. Larry Dietz, watch commander at the Los Angeles County coroner's office, said an autopsy was likely....

Logged

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40

Noting that the cause of Andrew Breitbart’s unexpected death yesterday was being examined by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office, talk-radio host Michael Savage raised the question of whether the conservative media powerhouse – who recently announced he had videos that could politically damage President Obama – was murdered.

On his top-rated show today, Savage played an audio clip of Breitbart telling an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last month that he had obtained videos that shed light on Obama’s ties to radicals in the early 1980s who helped propel him to the presidency.

“Maybe my overly active imagination kicked into overdrive,” Savage told his listeners of his decision to raise the question. “But you heard what Breitbart said – he has videos … we’re going to vet the president.”

Breitbart reportedly was walking near his home in Brentwood, Calif., just after midnight this morning when he collapsed. A neighbor saw him fall and called 911. Emergency crews tried to revive him and rushed him to the emergency room at the UCLA Medical Center.

It’s entirely plausible, Savage acknowledged, that Breitbart simply collapsed of a heart attack because of overwork and a reported history of health problems.

“I’m asking a crazy question,” Savage said, “but so what? We the people want an answer. This was not an ordinary man. If I don’t ask this question, I would be remiss.”

Breitbart told the CPAC crowd last month that the videos would reveal Obama during a time when he was meeting a “bunch of silver ponytails” – referring to Weather Underground terror group members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Ayers and Dohrn reportedly launched Obama’s political career with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

Savage noted that Breitbart had dinner with Ayers and Dorhn three weeks ago at the couple’s Hyde Park residence on Chicago’s South Side, which is near Obama’s home. Breitbart was invited by Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Tucker Carlson, who won an Internet auction for a dinner party with the couple.

“I’ve got videos – this election we’re going to vet him,” Breitbart said at CPAC, promising they would show how “racial division and class warfare are central” to the “hope and change” that Obama”sold in 2008.”

“He threatened the president at CPAC with video that could derail the president’s campaign,” Savage said.

“I pray it was natural causes, but we’ll never know the truth.”

Savage said that if Breitbart’s colleagues have the videos, they should post them as soon as possible and make them viral “or they’ll never see the light of day.”

Savage said he hadn’t spoken with Breitbart for the past two years, but he recalled the media mogul’s visited to his home in the Bay Area.

“He spoke for three straight hours,” Savage said. “I was unable to say a word.”

Savage also attended a party at Breitbart’s Los Angeles home.

“I told him two years ago to get a body guard. Never be alone in the street,” Savage said.

Savage, the author of the bestselling novel “Abuse of Power,” put on his novelist hat and speculated about ways a murderer could remain undetected by inducing a heart attack that didn’t leave any traces.

A caller from Savage’s native New York City said there’s a simple way to find out what happened.

“If the tapes come out, he died of a heart attack,” the caller said. “If the tapes don’t come out, they whacked him.”

Logged

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40

The Los Angeles County coroner's office will review the death of conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who collapsed and died Thursday while taking a nighttime walk near his Westwood home.

Given his young age -- he was 43 -- and the unexpected manner in which he died, authorities will conduct an autopsy to help determine a specific cause of death.

Breitbart's father-in-law, actor Orson Bean, said in an interview with The Times that Breitbart was found collapsed near his home about 12:30 a.m. Paramedics took him to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, but doctors were unable to revive him.

"We're devastated. I loved him like a son," Bean said. "It looks like a heart attack, but no one knows until" an autopsy is done.

Breitbart, a star of the tea party movement, was a Hollywood-hating, mainstream-media-loathing conservative, according to a Times profile.After 10 years as editor of the Drudge Report and helping to launch the Huffington Post, Breitbart launched in 2005 his news aggregation site Breitbart.com, which was designed to counter what he described as the "bully media cabal" that he said ignored stories at odds with prevailing liberal orthodoxy.

His goal, he often said, was to "destroy the institutional left."

His big splash came in 2009, when he posted an undercover video in which a pair of conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend asked employees of the community group ACORN for help with a brothel that would house underage Salvadorans.

ACORN was embarrassed when some of its workers seemed too helpful; Congress responded by defunding the organization.

In 2010, Breitbart posted a 2 1/2-minute video of Shirley Sherrod, a black employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in which she appeared to make racially charged comments.

It left viewers with the inaccurate impression Sherrod had deliberately not helped a white man save his family farm in 1986 when she worked for a Georgia nonprofit organization.

The furor from the video caused Sherrod to be fired; when it was later revealed her comments had been taken out of context, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called Sherrod to apologize and ask whether she would return to the department.

Breitbart's conservative news websites broke the story about the sexually charged tweets by Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat from New York, in a scandal that led to his resignation.

The Times' Robin Abcarian visited his office in West Los Angeles in 2010: "The command center of Andrew Breitbart's growing media empire is a suite of offices on Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Angeles with the temporary feel of a campaign office. Only the computers seem firmly anchored."

Breitbart lived in Westwood with his wife, Susie, and their four young children, Samson, 12; Mia, 10; Charlie, 6; and William, 4.. He was adopted by moderately conservative Jewish parents and attended two of L.A.'s most exclusive private schools —Carlthorp and Brentwood.

His father, Gerald, owned Fox and Hounds, a landmark Tudor-style Santa Monica restaurant that later became the punk rock club Madame Wong's West. His mother, Arlene, was an executive at Bank of America in Beverly Hills and downtown L.A.

Breitbart is also survived by his sister, Tracy.

Logged

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40

Darpa is going at securing cyberspace again, and this time they've got an open call to everyone to help them devise a program that will flag threats through irregular activity.

The new program called "Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination"—painstakingly abbreviated to SMITE—was started to point out threats in the massive amounts of data on the internet. The new idea behind the program is to track the the activity of individuals or groups, rather than look for hints of threats in the entire sea of information. Theoretically it will be easier to notice malicious intentions by looking for small differences in the constantly updated activities of single users rather than the whole mess of us.

All this cyber-sleuthing sounds questionable, as some future activity could be mistakenly flagged as hostile. To prevent this, Darpa is calling for submissions to build a massive database that will prevent any accidental interpretations. The call for participants is going on now and there's workshop set later this June. Start covering your tracks now.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for technology to address insider threats. DARPA will use the technology, called Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination (SMITE), to predict insider attacks, determine when one is underway and to detect one that has already taken place, according to the request for information issued May 10.

DARPA defines an insider threat as "malevolent (or possibly inadvertent) actions by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information and information systems and sources,” according to the RFI.

The agency plans to use forensics to find clues, gather and evaluate evidence and assess inferred actions and predict future behavior of the individual.

“In both the real and virtual world, it is very difficult to do anything without leaving some evidence behind. Attempts to conceal or remove evidence generally create new evidence that, if detected, could be a strong indication of the perpetrator’s intent,” the RFI stated.

The technology, which has not yet been specified, will be used to find individuals operating on U.S. networks. Specific topics of interest outlined in the RFI include:

* Techniques to derive information about the relationship between deductions, the likely intent of inferred actions, and suggestions about what evidence might mean. * Methods to dynamically forecast context-dependent behaviors – both malicious and non-malicious. * Online and offline algorithms for feature extraction and detection in enormous graphs (as in billions of nodes). * Hybrid engines where deduction and feature detection mutually inform one another.

Can software catch a cyberspy’s tricky intentions, before he’s started to help the other side? The way-out researchers at Darpa think so. They’re planning a new program, “Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination” or SMITE, that’s supposed to “dynamically forecast” when a mole is about to strike. Also, the code is meant to flag “inadvertent” disclosures “by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information.”

“Looking for clues” that suggest a turncoat or accidental leaker is about to spill (.pdf) “could potentially be easier than recognizing explicit attacks,” Darpa notes in a request for information. But even that simpler search won’t be easy. “Many attacks are combinations of directly observable and inferred events.” Which is why SMITE’s program managers are interested in techniques to figure out “the likely intent of inferred actions, and suggestions about what [that] evidence might mean.” That goes for “behaviors both malicious and non-malicious.”

Step one in starting that process: Build a ginormous database to store all kinds of information on would-be threats. “The next step is to determine whether an individual or group of individuals is exhibiting anomalous behavior that is also malicious.” That’s a toughie — something anomalous in one context might be perfectly normal in another. One possible solution, the SMITE paper adds, could be detecting “deceptive” activities, which are a sign of cyberspying. Or cheating on your taxes. Or carrying on an office affair. Or playing World of Warcraft on the job. Depending on the situation.

Over at The Register, Lew Page quips: “It will no doubt be a comfort for anyone in a position of trust within the U.S. information infrastructure to know that mighty military algorithms and hybrid engines will soon sniff your every move so as to forecast any context-dependent malice on your part — and then in some unspecified way (remember what the E in SMITE stands for) eliminate you as a threat.”

More likely, the program is just a way to do some basic research into algorithms’ ability to understand human intent. But since every Darpa program has to have some sort of military application — no matter how far-fetched — the agency has cooked up this cyberspy-fighting scenario.

Anyway, our spies tell us that Darpa is planning a SMITE workshop for mid-June in northern Virginia.

Our old friends at DARPA - the US military research bureau - have broached another intriguing and mildy upsetting scheme this week. This time the Pentagon boffins want nothing less than some kind of automated witch-finder technology able to finger "increasingly sophisticated malicious insider behavior" in the USA.

According to the US National Counterintelligence Strategy, “Trusted insiders ... are targeting the US information infrastructure for exploitation, disruption, and potential destruction”.

DARPA aren't having any of that, hence their new and sinisterly named Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination (SMITE) project. The warboffins state:We define insider threat as malevolent (or possibly inadvertent) actions by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information and information systems and sources.

Unspecified "technology" is to be developed to root out the traitors and incompetents menacing the US information infrastructure from within. The DARPA IT directors don't offer any details on how this is to be done, but they do give some general ideas:Security is often difficult because the defenses must be perfect, while the attacker needs to find only one flaw. An emphasis on forensics could reverse the burden by requiring the attacker and his tools to be perfect, while the defender needs only a few clues to recognize an intrusion is underway.

Topics of interest include ... suggestions about what evidence might mean and [ways to] forecast context-dependent behaviors both malicious and non-malicious.

Also of interest are on-line and off-line algorithms for feature extraction and detection in enormous graphs (as in billions of nodes) as well as hybrid engines where deduction and feature detection mutually inform one another.

It will no doubt be a comfort for anyone in a position of trust within the US information infrastructure to know that mighty military algorithms and hybrid engines will soon sniff your every move so as to forecast any context-dependent malice on your part - and then in some unspecified way (remember what the E in SMITE stands for) eliminate you as a threat.

But this is DARPA, so there's every chance that SMITE will never happen - or that if it does it will mutate into something completely different from what its creators intended.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for technology to address insider threats. DARPA will use the technology, called Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination (SMITE), to predict insider attacks, determine when one is underway and to detect one that has already taken place, according to the request for information issued May 10.

DARPA defines an insider threat as "malevolent (or possibly inadvertent) actions by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information and information systems and sources,” according to the RFI.

The agency plans to use forensics to find clues, gather and evaluate evidence and assess inferred actions and predict future behavior of the individual.

“In both the real and virtual world, it is very difficult to do anything without leaving some evidence behind. Attempts to conceal or remove evidence generally create new evidence that, if detected, could be a strong indication of the perpetrator’s intent,” the RFI stated.

The technology, which has not yet been specified, will be used to find individuals operating on U.S. networks. Specific topics of interest outlined in the RFI include:Techniques to derive information about the relationship between deductions, the likely intent of inferred actions, and suggestions about what evidence might mean.Methods to dynamically forecast context-dependent behaviors – both malicious and non-malicious.Online and offline algorithms for feature extraction and detection in enormous graphs (as in billions of nodes).Hybrid engines where deduction and feature detection mutually inform one another.

How bad is the threat of an insider attack against military information systems?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency answers that question in stark terms in its request for industry help to counter insider electronic moles:Trusted insiders ... are targeting the U.S. information infrastructure for exploitation, disruption, and potential destruction. [Emphasis included.]

National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States of America (2008).

DARPA says protecting information systems against bad insider actors is often difficultbecause the defenses must be perfect and comprehensive, while the attacker needs to find only one flaw.

That's why the agency said it has kicked off a project called Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination, which we all know stands for SMITE, a lovely play on words for fighting back against an enemy.

Detecting insider threats, DARPA said, remains a challenge because it requires unearthing subtle indicators of malicious behavior buried in enormous observational data of no immediate relevance, or zeroing in on one key signal out of a lot of background noise.

One way to detect insider threats is to focus on deceptive behavior, which is characteristic of malicious intent - which, by the way, leads to the problem of assigning intent to observed behaviors.

But DARPA added that in both the real and virtual world, it is very difficult to do anything without leaving some evidence behind. Attempts to conceal or remove evidence generally create new evidence that, if detected, could be a strong indication of the perpetrator's intent.

Forensic-like techniques can be used to find clues, gather and evaluate evidence and combine them deductively, and DARPA says it needs industry help in developing these techniques.

The agency wants vendors to provide it with white papers that include, but are not limited to, techniques to derive information about the relationship between deductions, the likely intent of inferred actions and suggestions about what evidence might mean and then dynamically forecast context-dependent behaviors.

The agency also would like ideas on how to use information sensors and algorithms to help it determine the scale and complexity of current and projected insider threats and novel approaches based on social behavioral science.

Can software catch a cyberspy’s tricky intentions, before he’s started to help the other side? The way-out researchers at Darpa think so. They’re planning a new program, “Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination” or SMITE, that’s supposed to “dynamically forecast” when a mole is about to strike. Also, the code is meant to flag “inadvertent” disclosures “by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information.”

“Looking for clues” that suggest a turncoat or accidental leaker is about to spill (.pdf) “could potentially be easier than recognizing explicit attacks,” Darpa notes in a request for information. But even that simpler search won’t be easy. “Many attacks are combinations of directly observable and inferred events.” Which is why SMITE’s program managers are interested in techniques to figure out “the likely intent of inferred actions, and suggestions about what [that] evidence might mean.” That goes for “behaviors both malicious and non-malicious.”

Step one in starting that process: Build a ginormous database to store all kinds of information on would-be threats. “The next step is to determine whether an individual or group of individuals is exhibiting anomalous behavior that is also malicious.” That’s a toughie — something anomalous in one context might be perfectly normal in another. One possible solution, the SMITE paper adds, could be detecting “deceptive” activities, which are a sign of cyberspying. Or cheating on your taxes. Or carrying on an office affair. Or playing World of Warcraft on the job. Depending on the situation.

Over at The Register, Lew Page quips: “It will no doubt be a comfort for anyone in a position of trust within the U.S. information infrastructure to know that mighty military algorithms and hybrid engines will soon sniff your every move so as to forecast any context-dependent malice on your part — and then in some unspecified way (remember what the E in SMITE stands for) eliminate you as a threat.”

More likely, the program is just a way to do some basic research into algorithms’ ability to understand human intent. But since every Darpa program has to have some sort of military application — no matter how far-fetched — the agency has cooked up this cyberspy-fighting scenario.

Anyway, our spies tell us that Darpa is planning a SMITE workshop for mid-June in northern Virginia.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Noting that the cause of Andrew Breitbart’s unexpected death yesterday was being examined by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office, talk-radio host Michael Savage raised the question of whether the conservative media powerhouse – who recently announced he had videos that could politically damage President Obama – was murdered.

On his top-rated show today, Savage played an audio clip of Breitbart telling an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last month that he had obtained videos that shed light on Obama’s ties to radicals in the early 1980s who helped propel him to the presidency.

“Maybe my overly active imagination kicked into overdrive,” Savage told his listeners of his decision to raise the question. “But you heard what Breitbart said – he has videos … we’re going to vet the president.”

Breitbart reportedly was walking near his home in Brentwood, Calif., just after midnight this morning when he collapsed. A neighbor saw him fall and called 911. Emergency crews tried to revive him and rushed him to the emergency room at the UCLA Medical Center.

It’s entirely plausible, Savage acknowledged, that Breitbart simply collapsed of a heart attack because of overwork and a reported history of health problems.

“I’m asking a crazy question,” Savage said, “but so what? We the people want an answer. This was not an ordinary man. If I don’t ask this question, I would be remiss.”

Breitbart told the CPAC crowd last month that the videos would reveal Obama during a time when he was meeting a “bunch of silver ponytails” – referring to Weather Underground terror group members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Ayers and Dohrn reportedly launched Obama’s political career with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

Savage noted that Breitbart had dinner with Ayers and Dorhn three weeks ago at the couple’s Hyde Park residence on Chicago’s South Side, which is near Obama’s home. Breitbart was invited by Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Tucker Carlson, who won an Internet auction for a dinner party with the couple.

“I’ve got videos – this election we’re going to vet him,” Breitbart said at CPAC, promising they would show how “racial division and class warfare are central” to the “hope and change” that Obama”sold in 2008.”

“He threatened the president at CPAC with video that could derail the president’s campaign,” Savage said.

“I pray it was natural causes, but we’ll never know the truth.”

Savage said that if Breitbart’s colleagues have the videos, they should post them as soon as possible and make them viral “or they’ll never see the light of day.”

Savage said he hadn’t spoken with Breitbart for the past two years, but he recalled the media mogul’s visited to his home in the Bay Area.

“He spoke for three straight hours,” Savage said. “I was unable to say a word.”

Savage also attended a party at Breitbart’s Los Angeles home.

“I told him two years ago to get a body guard. Never be alone in the street,” Savage said.

Savage, the author of the bestselling novel “Abuse of Power,” put on his novelist hat and speculated about ways a murderer could remain undetected by inducing a heart attack that didn’t leave any traces.

A caller from Savage’s native New York City said there’s a simple way to find out what happened.

“If the tapes come out, he died of a heart attack,” the caller said. “If the tapes don’t come out, they whacked him.”

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All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

A new video game is giving players a chance to explore a post-apocalyptic Fox News studio and kill off zombies that resemble famous conservatives including Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.

The game, called "Tea Party Zombies Must Die," is project by StarvingEyes Advergaming, a website that provides games for online viral campaigns.

Other characters in the first-person shooter include the "Generic Pissed Off Old White Guy Zombie," the "Pissed Off Stupid White Trash Redneck Birther Zombie" and the "Express Racist Views Anonymously On The Internet Modern Klan Zombie," who dons the remains of a KKK robe as he wanders around with a sign that describes President Barack Obama as a MuslimYou can see some of the characters in the game in this video from MRC TV:

According to National Review Online, players get "informative tidbits" between levels about how Obama's health care plan lowers the deficit, and "how most Republicans think the president is a Muslim."

Jason Oda, the head of StarvingEyes, told MRC TV the game was a personal project and downplayed the criticism coming from conservative circles.

"I am not worried about it affecting business," Oda said.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

The news quickly sent conservative bloggers--still shocked by Breitbart's sudden death--into a frenzy.

"In a stunning coincidence," Paul Joseph Watson wrote on InfoWars.com, "it appears Andrew Breitbart suffered his untimely death just hours before he was set to release damning video footage that could have sunk Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign."

Quote

But it wasn't just Sinclair News that housed conspiracy theorists. Conservative site InfoWars.com had plenty of speculations too.

"I'm going to reiterate what I said before," a commenter wrote on InfoWars.com. "In my opinion THIS GUY GOT ELIMINATED. Plain and simple." And another wrote: "Anybody who gets too close to the truth will be killed."

Terrorist Bill Ayers recently bragged about hosting a fundraiser for Barack Obama in his home back in the 1990′s. Ayers told the audience, “I thought he wanted to be mayor of Chicago – that’s the limit of my imagination.” The audience loved it.

From the video: In this clips obtained exclusively by Education Action Group at a recent “Rethinking Schools” event, Ayers recalls his fundraising for Barack Obama and fellow radical Bob Peterson.

Of course, the one time the liberal media asked Obama about his association with Bill Ayers in 2008, he said Ayers was “just another guy in the neighborhood.”This was despite the fact that they were well aquainted and shared an office in Chicago.

Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5

We could complain all day about how evil and corrupt the banker-owned political establishment is, it still wouldn't bring Andrew Breitbart or any other assassination victim back to life.

So the question is: can anything positive be derived from Breitbart's death?

If there's only one thing that can, it's this: Breitbart's assassination can be made to convince whistleblowers everywhere that the price for sitting on -- rather than immediately releasing -- explosive information about a high-level minion of the NWO is death.

If there are any whistleblowers out there reading this, to you I say: if you value your own life, then the best way to protect yourself is to release whatever information you have sooner rather than later, and to the widest possible audience -- preferably on the Alex Jones Show -- that way millions of people know about it, not just you.

Nothing sends political cockroaches scurrying faster than the public spotlight.

Raytheon announced today it has been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to support its Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales program, a cybersecurity initiative that will use algorithms to better detect anomalous behaviors and insider threats. Raytheon will create, adapt and apply technology to the problem of anomaly characterization and detection in large data sets.

According to Raytheon, the ADAMS project will use data collected by Raytheon‘s endpoint audit and investigation solution known as SureView. The specific goal of ADAMS researchers is to detect anomalous behaviors shortly after a trusted insider “turns” and begins committing malicious acts.

“This project will provide unprecedented understanding of the insider threat at a time when the U.S. government is mandating that agencies implement automated insider threat detection capabilities to protect their classified information systems,” said Steve Hawkins, vice president of Raytheon’s Intelligence and Information Systems’ Information Security Solutions business. “The ADAMS program will ensure that operationally proven tools such as SureView can be further enhanced to keep pace with the ever-evolving nature of the insider threat and allow analysts to better identify precursor behaviors before damaging incidents occur.”

Raytheon’s SureView is an appliance-based solution that detects threats by auditing end-user behavior on computer endpoints for policy violations and high-risk activity, such as accessing classified or proprietary data and trying to send it outside the firewall.

ADAMS will leverage massive data sets from large computer end-user populations observed in live, operational environments. According to the company, DARPA has stated it wants the technology developed by ADAMS researchers to bolster the capabilities of existing sensor suites currently employed by cybersecurity analysts and operators.

Related posts:Raytheon Launches New Cybersecurity ProductRaytheon Taps Kevin Brown to Lead Cybersecurity Ops at Fort Meade OfficesBids Open for New Cyber-Insider Threat ProgramDARPA Looks to SMITE TraitorsNGA Awards $30 Million Extension to Raytheon

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All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

I am currently working on the SMITE project, as part of DARPA's Scalable Network Monitoring program. SMITE aims at performing intrusion detection on ultra high speed network traffic (up to 100 Gbps).

My particular role in the project is to work on what is called intrusion detection system (IDS) "correlation" (correlation is actually a misleading term, what is really meant here is "fusion.")

Even more specifically, my work is in the component that is called the "evidence assessor." This component uses qualitative Bayesian reasoning to weigh competing hypotheses for clusters of IDS resports. Often these competing explanations weigh malign (malware sweeping the network in order to spread) against benign (print daemons looking for networked printers) explanations; the evidence assessor helps us address the problem of false positives that has plagued IDSes.

This project continues work on techniques that were first developed in the ARGUS/Scyllarus project.

Papers from SMITE:"Model-based Intrusion Assessment in Common Lisp ," with Steven A. Harp, in working notes of the ICAPS 2009 Workshop on Computer Security and Artificial Intelligence (SecArt), Thessaloniki, Greece, September, 2009. This paper is a mild revision and reformatting of the ILC paper, listed below, which is the authoritative (archival) version."Model-based Intrusion Assessment in Common Lisp," with Steven A. Harp Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference, Cambridge, MA, 2009. Integrated learning (Planning, Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web)

My most recently concluded activity was working on the BBN-led POIROT team for DARPA's Integrated Learning program, which aimed at integrating together a large number of intelligent systems to learn workflows from observing humans using web services.

Papers from Integrated Learning:2010"Shopper: a system for executing and simulating expressive plans," Proceedings of ICAPS 2010, Toronto, Canada, 2010. short paper with John Maraist. There was also be a demonstration of this system at ICAPS 2010.2009"A Semantics for HTN Methods," in the Proceedings of ICAPS 2009, Thessaloniki, Greece, September, 2009."Partial Observability, Quantification, and Iteration for Planning: Work in Progress," in working notes of the ICAPS 2009 Workshop on Generalized Planning, Thessaloniki, Greece, September, 2009."SHOPPER: Interpreter for a high-level web services language," with John Maraist, in the Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference, Cambridge, MA, March 2009."LTML -- a language for representing semantic web service workflow procedures," with Mark Burstein, et al., To appear in the working notes of the "Semantics for the Rest of Us" workshop at the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009).2008"Using Classical Planners to Solve Nondeterministic Planning Problems," with Ugur Kuter, Dana Nau and Elnatan Reisner, in the Proceedings of ICAPS 2008, Sydney, Australia, September 2008.2007"HOTRiDE: Hierarchical Ordered Task Replanning in Dynamic Environments," with N. Fazil Ayan, Ugur Kuter, and Fusun Yaman, on replanning and execution monitoring of HTNs. "Conditionalization: Adapting forward-chaining planners to partially observable environments," with Ugur Kuter, Dana Nau, Elnatan Reisner, Proceedings of ICAPS-2007.Planning for Uninhabited Air Vehicles (UAVs)

I've been doing a lot of work on planning for UAVs in the past years. This is closely related to my interest in Planning for Intelligent UIs, since we're trying to use AI planners to make it easier to command complex behaviors of autonomous systems. Unfortunately, the pace of this work has been such that I have not had time to write much about it. Here are some snippets:With Mark Boddy, I taught a tutorial on planner domain modeling at ICAPS05 (June 2005).Most of this work has been funded under two U.S. government SBIR contracts: PVACS and TUSC.At the ICAPS 2004 workshop on Connecting Planning Theory with Practice, I presented a paper with some lessons learned about using the SHOP2 planner in a UAV control interface.I've been contributing to the maintenance of the SHOP2 HTN planning system.Planning and Controller Synthesis

My work in automatic controller synthesis has mostly been done in collaboration with my colleague, David Musliner. He introduced me to the CIRCA architecture he developed (while at the University of Michigan). CIRCA is a novel architecture for doing intelligent control in hard real-time. I have since done work on incorporating model-checking into the architecture, doing abstraction-based controller synthesis, and extending the modeling capabilities for hierarchical control.

In 2001 I participated in the NASA New Millennium Program planning process, and to be on the program committee of the AAAI Symposium on Model-Based Validation of Intelligence, to be held at Stanford in March, 2001.

In 2002, I presented results from this work at the 2002 Workshop on Hybrid Control: Control and Computation (HSCC-2002).

In 2005, Musliner, Pelican, and I wrote a paper about incremental verification in controller synthesis at the Third Workshop on Model Checking and Artificial Intelligence (MoChArt05).

February 2006: Our paper on incremental verification in controller synthesis has been published in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. You may find the paper through Elsevier's ScienceDirect website.

For recent papers in this area, click here.

My work on planning and controller synthesis grew out of earlier work on planning in conditions of incomplete information.Information Fusion

I am interested in the use of Bayesian networks (belief networks, causal probabilistic networks) to do information fusion. I have worked on this in the context of troubleshooting abnormal situations in oil refineries (in the context of Honeywell's project on Abnormal Situation Management), and am now exploring the use of belief networks for information fusion in computer network intrusion detection (see the Argus project).Planning with Incomplete Information

I became interested in work on planning under uncertainty as an outgrowth of my interest in general aspects of reasoning under uncertainy. Some of my early work in this area was concerned with developing a better understanding of algorithms for conditional planning, such as CNLP and Cassandra. This led me to work on formalizing the problem of conditional planning, and the development of algorithms for conditional linear planning and epsilon-safe planning. Some relevant papers include:Representing Uncertainy in Simple Planners (from KR-94): Postscript only;Conditional Linear Planning (from AIPS-94): Postscript and pdf;Epsilon-Safe Planning (from UAI-94): Postscript and pdf;Expressive Planning and Explicit Knowledge (from AIPS-96): Postscript and pdf;

These papers were all written with Mark S. Boddy at Honeywell Laboratories.Planning for Intelligent User Interfaces

Through work with colleagues in user-centered design, notably Chris Miller, I have become interested in exploring the ways that planning systems, particularly constraint-based planning systems, can provide a user-interface to advanced control systems. One of the systems my group at Honeywell built was a multi-agent constraint-based planner (see below). Much of that work was done in conjunction with my colleague Karen Haigh.In the course of this work, I have become interested in using optimization as a way to manage user interaction for intelligent systems. With some colleagues, I have written this work up in a paper that appeard in the 2005 proceedings of the American Helicopter Society's International Specialists' Meeting on Unmanned Rotorcraft: "Optimizing to Satisfice."

In 2006, a paper entitled "Delegation Interfaces for a Dynamic and Unpredictable Task: A Mobile Target Tracking Example," with my colleagues Chris Miller and Harry Funk, was presented at the NATO RTO Human Factors and Medicine Panel (HFM) Symposium which was held in Biarritz, France, 9-11 October 2006. I will make that paper available here if that's legal.

A paper about the general approach, but written for a human factors audience, rather than an AI audience appeared at the HFES conference: "The Playbook Approach to Adaptive Automation," Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 49th Annual Meeting, 2005. Miscellaneous

From 2005 through 2007 I worked on the DARPA Coordinators program. This was a research program investigating coordination across multiple agents that execute complex, hierarchical tasks, in a dynamic environment. See multi-agent coordination.

My earliest work at Honeywell Technology Center was done on planning under uncertainty, and on constraint-based scheduling, specifically for batch manufacturing (a kind of manufacturing that is a hybrid between continuous and discrete manufacturing. For information on this work, and an off-print of an article from IEEE Intelligent Systems, send me some email.

Another offshoot of my work on controller synthesis has been an interest in verification. Here is a paper I co-authored, appearing in the proceedings of the 2001 Spin Workshop, describing work on verification at Honeywell Laboratories.This web page is currently very much under construction.

Curriculum Vitae

My CV is available as HTML for easier browsing.

I have removed the MS Word version because keeping it up-to-date was difficult, especially in the face of revisions to the software and file formats. If you must have it in MS Word, please try to import the HTML and contact me if you have any problems.

I will also make publications available through this web site. Recent papersHere are some of my recent papers in various interest areas: Planning: There are a number of papers that should be added here. See also CIRCA papers and Constraint-based planning, and Integrated Learning. "Durative Planning in HTNs," short paper in Proceedings of ICAPS 2006, June 2006.Multi-agent coordination Coordinating Highly Contingent Plans: Biasing Distributed MDPs Towards Cooperative Behavior, with David J. Musliner, Ed Durfee and Mark Boddy, paper for the ICAPS 2008 Multiagent Planning Workshop."Flexibly Integrating Deliberation and Execution in Decision-Theoretic Agents," with David Musliner, Jim Carciofini, Ed Durfee, Jianhui Wu, and Mark Boddy. Paper for the ICAPS-2007 workshop on Planning and Plan Execution for Real-World Systems: Principles and Practices for Planning in Execution."Unrolling" Complex Task Models into MDPs, paper for the working notes of the AAAI 2007 Spring Symposium on Game Theory and Decision Theory. Describes work on compiling complex hierarchical task models (specifically in the TAEMS language) into Markov Decision Processes. Joint work with Dave Musliner, Mark Boddy, Ed Durfee, and Jianhui Wu.AAAI Spring Symposium 2006 paper, Coordinated Plan Management Using Multiagent MDPs, describes work I'm doing with researchers from Honeywell, Adventium Labs, and the University of Michigan on the DARPA Coordinators program."CTAEMS Language Specification," with Mark Boddy, Bryan Horling, John Phelps, Regis Vincent, A. Chris Long, Bob Kohout, and Rajiv Maheswaran. This was the specification for a dialect of the TAEMS multi-agent HTN notation, developed for the DARPA Coordinators program that clarified a number of issues in the original TAEMS language design.Planning and AI Planning: I had a paper, with Jeff Abbott and John R. Surdu, on a simulation-based paradigm for military operations planning in the September 2008, SIW workshop: "Task-based Approach to Planning".Plan recognition: "Recognizing Plans with Loops Represented in a Lexicalized Grammar," with Christopher W. Geib, in the Proceedings of the AAAI Conference, San Francisco, CA, August 2011. I was one of the chairs of a Dagstuhl workshop on plan recognition, held in April, 2011. The final report, which I edited with the other chairs (Chris Geib, Henry Kautz and Tamim Asfour) is available here. "Handling Looping and Optional Actions in YAPPR," with Christopher W. Geib, in the AAAI Workshop on Plan, Activity and Intent Recognition (PAIR), Atlanta, GA, 2010. "Plan Libraries for Plan Recognition: Do We Really Know What They Model?", with Froduald Kabanza and Philipe Bellefeuille, in the AAAI Workshop on Plan, Activity and Intent Recognition (PAIR), Atlanta, GA, 2010. "A Probabilistic plan recognition algorithm based on plan tree grammars," with Christopher W. Geib, Artificial Intelligence, volume 117, number 11, 2009."A New Probabilistic Plan Recognition Algorithm Based on String Rewriting," joint work with Chris Geib and John Maraist, in the Proceedings of ICAPS-2008, Sydney, Australia, 2008. A somewhat more updated, and more conjectural version of the above paper, for presentation at the Plan, Activity and Intent Recognition Workshop at IJCAI-2009 is here."Partial Observability and Probabilistic Plan/Goal Recognition," joint work with Chris Geib, in the proceedings of the 2005 Workshop on Modeling Others from Observations. A New Theory of Plan Recognition, published in the Proceedings of the 1999 Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, joint work with Chris Geib and Chris Miller. Available in pdf or postscript. (For some reason, at least on my screen, the pdf looks horrible, and my version of gnu ghostview can't open the postscript, although kghostview can. Not sure why. Sorry.)Reactive Planning/Controller Synthesis: I have been working, in the context of the CIRCA intelligent control architecture, on the problem of automatically synthesizing hard real-time controllers. Some recent papers in this area are: The Evolution of CIRCA, a Theory-Based AI Architecture with Real-Time Performance Guarantees , a AAAI Spring Symposium paper from 2008 giving an overview of the CIRCA architecture and its history.Incremental Verification for On-the-Fly Controller Synthesis, with David Musliner and Michael Pelican, at MoChart05.For the AAAI 2000 Symposium on Hybrid Control; you can find it here.For the 2002 Workshop on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control. Click here for my paper.A similar paper, with a couple of improvements, and written more for an AI audience, will be presented at the 2002 AIPS workshop on Planning via Model Checking."Modifying HyTech to automatically synthesize hybrid controllers," with R. Deshpande, D.J. Musliner, Jorge Tierno and Steve Pratt, Proceedings of the Conference on Decision and Control, pp. 1223-1228, Orlando, FL, 2001Deliberation Scheduling/Metareasoning: The CIRCA architecture relies on having a real-time subsystem that provides hard real-time reactions, while its AI subsystem has the freedom to use planning algorithms that may be intractable. Recently, we have been working to get the inference of the AI subsystem under timing discipline, as well. To do this, we have been pursuing methods of deliberation scheduling, specially tailored to the CIRCA framework. Our earliest experiments in this line of work have been written-up in a paper entitled Managing Online Self-Adaptation in Real-Time Environments, available in postscript or pdf. I presented this paper at the International Workshop on Self-Adaptive Software, in mid-May 2001.Constraint-based planning: "MACBeth: A Multi-Agent Constraint-Based Planner" --- This paper was presented at the AAAI-2000 workshop on Constraints and AI Planning. Postscript or Adobe Acrobat.More recently, I was co-author on a survey of Constraint-based planning that grew out of the AAAI-2000 workshop. A preprint is available in postscript. The paper will appear in AI magazine.Computer security and information fusion: In 2010, I was co-chair (with Mark S. Boddy and Stefan Edelkamp) of the SecArt workshop on Security and Artificial Intelligence, at AAAI in Atlanta, Georgia. "Model-based Intrusion Assessment in Common Lisp," with Steven A. Harp, presented at the International Lisp Conference, March 2009.Information Modeling for Intrusion Report Aggregation, Postscript and Adobe Acrobat.Plan Recognition in Intrusion Detection Systems, Postscript and Adobe Acrobat.A Stochastic Model for Intrusions, Adobe Acrobat presented at the 2002 Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID-2002).Common Lisp Build System: I have recently spent some time helping Faré (François-René Rideau) develop the new version of ASDF (Another System Definition Facility), the de facto standard build system for Common Lisp. I am proud to say that our ASDF 2 is now distributed with all major CL implementations. The project raised a number of interesting issues arising from Lisp's rich notion of a run-time environment (meaning that simply aping make is a non-starter); the way this rich environment requires us to ``hot patch'' an existing ASDF in a CL environment; the fact that there are multiple CL implementations, not just a single reference implementation; etc. We describe this work in a paper published at the 2010 International Lisp Conference: "Evolving ASDF: More cooperation, less coordination," François-René Rideau and Robert P. Goldman, Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference, Reno, NV, 2010. The ARGUS project

One of my last research projects at Honeywell, and one of those of which I was most proud was the ARGUS project. The ARGUS project was work in the area of computer security, specifically intrusion detection. The objective of the ARGUS project was to provide a framework for fusing the reports of multiple intrusion detection systems into a single unified view of a computer installation's security situation. This work builds on my interest in qualitative probability and Bayesian approaches to information fusion.

A couple of papers on the Argus project, were published at the DISCEX-2001 conference. Drafts are available:Information Modeling for Intrusion Report Aggregation, Postscript and Adobe Acrobat.Plan Recognition in Intrusion Detection Systems, Postscript and Adobe Acrobat.

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

Just an FYI regarding false narratives about Breitbart. He has been accused of being the cause of the Shirley Sherrod firing which is bullcrap. Jon Stewart exposed the truth about this when it happened:

After railing against Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack for saying that Sherrod’s dismissal “should have been done in a more personal way, with far more thought and far less haste,” he then mocked the NAACP for claiming to have been “snookered” and the White House’s unique non-apology apology. Shockingly, however, Stewart appeared to give Andrew Breitbart a pass – not for his actions, per se, but rather his candor in admitting his agenda five months back:Stewart: First of all, Fox News is too busy with their black panther hard-on to bother much with this. And Andrew Breitbart, the guy who leaked the edited tape, may be the most honest person in this entire story. This is what he said five months ago:

Bretibart (from file footage): I want to be in the history books saying I took down the institutional left.

Stewart: See he didn’t say “I want to be in the history books a aparagon of honesty,” he didn’t say “I would like to be in the Museum of Broadacsting, and to be known by children around the wold as Arnold B. Truthington of Accuracy Lane.”

Echoing claims he made on MSNBC in April, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart blamed Fox News host Glenn Beck for a clip that portrayed U.S. Department of Agriculture state director Shirley Sherrod as racist.

Breitbart accused Beck of taking the video of Sherrod and cutting it up into 15 second pieces on his radio program, ignoring Breitbart’s original focus on the NAACP and instead making it solely about Sherrod.

“He found out between the time he did the radio show and the TV show that he had screwed the pooch,” Breitbart said. “So he goes on the TV show and does a 180 degree turn and changes the entire narrative. Who suffered from that? Me because it made it look like I had gone after Sherrod. He had gone after Sherrod and then he turned her into a victim.”

Mediaite reported that Breitbart attacked Beck on Tuesday night in a series of postings on Twitter, claiming Beck had “thrown [him] under the bus” and taken content from his websites without attribution.

Watch video, courtesy of The Tolbert Report, below:

Logged

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately